small form factor gaming computers - smallest possible [ 4 liter ] build

 This is my spot for describing the tiny, high performance computers that i have been building.

Although over 60 years of age, i continue to enjoy computer gaming.

And, i am not talking about tetris.

Lately, i am playing Doom 2016 at the ultra violence level, at 1440 p and at 180 frames per second, with all settings on ultra.

Even this somewhat modest level of play requires a high wattage video card and processor.

Trying to keep 500 watts of parts relatively cool in a tiny case is a real challenge.

In fact, it is a very cool game itself!

Feast your eyes on my smallest build, from the mother board side.

The case is sandwich style, with the mother board and graphics card on opposite sides of a divider.

The case is the A1 from a Chinese company called zzaw. Actually, a pretty good case, made of 2 mm thick aluminum. 

the power supply is the Enhance Flex 600W Power Supply ENP-7660B

it is costly, and you pretty much have to swap out the noisy fan that comes built in.

So, this is a pretty hard project for an ordinary builder of large computers.

In fact, i failed to get the Noctua NF-A4x20 PWM, Premium Quiet Fan, 4-Pin (40x20mm, Brown) to run on the internal pins of the power supply. i had to leave a 4 pin fan connector sticking out of the power supply along with the bundle of wires that depart it. So, i used one of the 3 fan headers on this particular mother board, which is the GIGABYTE B550I AORUS PRO AX.

Other items that i used are the samsung 980 pro m.2 drive with heat sink,

and a set of 2 * 8 gig ram sticks at 3.6 gHz and the amd 5600G processor.

In fact, the low end processor from amd can not run an m.2 drive at it's full speed, but an expensive, fast solid state drive is still a useful investment.

The processor is also not the right choice for using with a  graphics card, because it has on board graphics that displace some of it's ordinary processing abilities.

I chose it to run without a gpu during the chip shortage when it was hard to obtain one.

When it tried to upgrade the 5600 G with a 5900 X, i received a bad processor from Amazon. This problem was rampant with the mail order companies at the start of covid.

you would pay full price for a new part, and get an open box with a bad used part.

I also got an intel mother board in a taped shut bag with no gigabyte materials, and it was broken to hell. I tried to send it, and the i7 processor [that also arrived opened and used] back to Amazon, and they refused to take back the processor. 

I had already been banned from reviewing products, because i would reveal their various scams to customers. So, not a huge thumbs up for the company that has become our supplier of everything.

 

Are AMD processors good?

This was my first experience with amd.

These processors are just for gaming, and do not work well in tight cases or for anything outside of gaming. For an example, the 5600 G is limited to clock speeds of 3 to about 4.5 gHz.

That is great for gaming, but terrible for watching a movie. The AMD chip sits there trying to bake a batch of cookies while idling at 1 or 3 % of its wattage. Even for gaming, the intel processors work much better. An intel chip will ramp up to 5 gHz, and just stay there for the whole game. An AMD chip will start at 5 gHz, but pull down to 4.3 when it is loaded. Also AMD gave up on quality control and stopped testing the chips at the factory during the shortage. so, together with the scammy way that the same dead chips are sold again and again at Amazon, you were almost sure to get a bad chip and to have trouble selling it back to amazon. The flip side of the argument is that AMD is reusing the socket for many years, instead of creating a custom socket for each generation of processor. i was impressed with how much graphics power could be packed into the processor itself, but, in the end, this really does not matter. Modern gaming simply does not work well on a processor chip. It requires a card of it's own, with a separate way to remove hundreds of watts of heat.

on the gpu side of the divider, you can see the cute little dual fan gtx 1660 super from zotak. 

this gpu is actually way more powerful than the huge 1660s of the past, because it deploys modern memory that is twice as fast. It allows this tiny box to game for as long as desired at 1080p with ultra settings, or 1440p with pretty high settings and frame rates. there is no ray tracing, and even if ray tracing existed, you would turn it off when gaming using this 125 watt graphics card.

you can see the 4 terrabyte hard drive that is jammed into the slot that has been provided for cables to change sides. i was not sure that this arrangement would work thermally, but with the bare metal top of the drive pressed to the aluminum case, the slim 92 mm fan at the top of the case pulls enough air past the drive to keep it quite cool. It is good that the case maker provided the holes on the bottom, and the tall legs, so that plenty of air could enter the case to be pumped back out through the power supply, and to send a draft past the hard drive, and out through the top. The gpu draws fresh air from the side of the case, and sends it out the top.

All fans are from Noctua, which is the Austrian company that makes the most quiet fans in the world. If there is room, it is possible to swap the gpu fans for Noctuas as well. In this case, there is 1 mm between the fans and the case, so I tied the gpu back with a zip tie and left the stock fans in place.

Performance: the standard way to get smooth gaming is to use a program like msi afterburner, and a benchmark program like heaven, to tune the fan speeds and the voltage for the gpu.

the idea is to load the GPU fully, and to lower the GPU voltage until it looses stability, and then raise it back to the last stable voltage. the fans are tuned to give both cool temps and an acceptable level of noise.
I can go into way more detail, or even create a build video if readers wish to build their own small form factor gamer.  I has been fun to learn more about modern computers. They have become a sort of light sculpture or visual delight, as well as an expensive fun-oven to play with. 

finally, we need to get a feel for the size of this build...

here is my very lovely assistant testing the small build for sturdiness.  He is clearly coiling up for a huge jump, to see if he can reach a very high shelf where he likes to roost. Also, the size is pretty apparent. it is a little small for a cat bed, or maybe even for a cat podium. The A1 case fits in a Pelican 1400 Case.

the only thing better than a cat..... is Two cats!